I recently attended a presentation on the usability of a Museum’s website. The company running the usability study had set a series of tasks and monitored and filmed a small, but varied demographic of potential users attempting to complete them.
The feedback, while not rocket science, was fascinating. Many of the users made the same basic mistakes in navigating the site and with just a few users being monitored a comprehensive list of recommended changes were made. My expectation at this point that many of these changes would involve a serious overall of the site but the reality was quite the contrary. A series of small and simple changes were identified that could make a significant difference to the end users. This led me to considered the world of Financial services systems that I have grown to love and cherish.
Many of the point of sale systems are not given the same level of usability focus and given the potential productivity gains this is crazy. The costs of usability studies are not immense and as studies show that the optimum number of users to include in such research is only 5, they are not disruptive to the business either.
As I left the presentation I couldn’t help feeling many of the users of complex financial systems are rather short changed in term of the usability of their software applications.
